Conflict’s Many Marks on the Map

A photograph by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla of footprints on Vieques, off the Puerto Rican mainland.Credit
Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla/Galerie Chantal Crousel

It has been said that geography creates war and wars create geography. “Nobody’s Property: Art, Land, Space, 2000-2010,” at the Princeton University Art Museum, might be used as evidence, since its works, by nine artists — including two artist duos — center mostly on disputed land and the scorching aftermath of war.

Like a contested border zone, the exhibition should include some kind of signage or warning: for a modest show, there is much to take in. “Nobody’s Property” touches down in the Middle East; Vieques, off the mainland of Puerto Rico; the Mexican-American border; Dresden circa 1945; and outer space.

Time is an issue, too. Andrea Geyer’s neo-conceptual photo and text piece about sovereignty and the Navajo Nation in the American Southwest includes many paragraphs of prose printed in small, handsome type, as well as an 11-page booklet of “footnotes.” And if you watched every commentary for Francis Alÿs’s video, centered on the Green Line in Jerusalem, an armistice line established at the end of the Arab-Israeli War in 1948-49, you would be investing at least a couple of hours.

Photo

An image from a video by Francis Alÿs centered on the Green Line, the armistice line in Jerusalem.Credit
Francis Al�s/David Zwirner

The show starts with a succinct work by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla made in 2001 and 2002. Photographs of footprints in the sand function as documents of a performance protest in which the artists and their associates went to Vieques and trespassed on a beach used by the United States military as a bombing range. Before going, though, they customized the soles of their shoes with outline images of people protesting or being arrested, or with texts saying things like “we accuse the U.S. Navy of thwarting, for more than a half-century, the healthy development of our economy.”

Mr. Alÿs’s work is next. Those well acquainted with contemporary art will have seen or heard of it, since it has become a kind of instant classic of the Middle East conflict genre since its creation in 2007. Like much of the best art that addresses Israeli-Palestinian politics, it takes a poetically open-ended approach. Hence the title: “The Green Line: Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic.”

The “something” Mr. Alÿs does is poke a hole in a can of green paint and wander along the border, through neighborhoods and checkpoints, attracting the attention of children and a few goats. (Interestingly, soldiers along the way pretty much ignore him.) The installation includes a map of the area from about 1946, showing how geography, which looks permanent on paper, is subject to change. Viewers can use a computer to choose a soundtrack by one of several commentators.

Photo

An image from “Kings of the Hill,” a video by Yael Bartana about an Israeli recreation custom.Credit
Yael Bartana/Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.

Yael Bartana’s “Kings of the Hill,” from 2003, is another video that has been shown in multiple places, including at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens, in an exhibition of her work in 2008 and 2009. Shot in a resort town near Tel Aviv, it captures a weird, macho recreation custom in which men drive their sport utility vehicles up and down sand dunes on Friday afternoons. Actually, perhaps it’s not so weird, since the video suggests that all land grabs and attempts to become “king of the hill” — even when just for sport — involve wheel spinning, squandering of resources and displays of testosterone.

Compared with the works by Mr. Alÿs and Ms. Bartana, the photographs of scorched fake-vintage Lebanese postcards by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige look rather slight. Beirut was, of course, a resort city in the 1960s, and the artists have fabricated sunny resort postcards from that period, then photographed them, burned the negatives a bit, and rephotographed them to suggest a firebombed city.

It’s a fairly one-note gimmick, not helped by the fact that the postcards are attributed to a fictional photographer, one Abdalla Farah, who supposedly burned his negatives in dismay over the country’s civil war, which started in 1975. The problem is also that Walid Raad, a fellow Lebanese artist, uses the fictional-history tactic to better ends.

Photo

A work by Matthew Day Jackson made of wood carved to recreate an aerial map of Dresden after the bombing of 1945.Credit
Bruce M. White

Santiago Sierra’s slide projection “Submission (formerly Word of Fire),” from 2006-7, is also a rather slight statement, although, typically for his oeuvre, it involved considerable production maneuvers. In it, a group of men is shown digging the word “sumisión” (Spanish for “submission”) into the desert near Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Mr. Sierra had hoped to pour gasoline into the depressions and torch the whole thing — for aesthetic effect, apparently — but was thwarted, according to the wall label, by “environmental regulations (and possibly the resistance of the local community).” It’s funny to read this in the context of this show, and just after seeing Ms. Bartana’s video, with its spotlight on showy masculine posturing.

Torching was also involved in the creation of Matthew Day Jackson’s huge wall piece made of wood carved to recreate an aerial map of Dresden then burned to simulate the look of the city after it was bombed in February 1945.

Emre Hüner’s video “Juggernaut,” from 2009, is the most playful work in the show. It combines, among other things, scenes of a fictional Bolshevik aviation club, a group of gray-haired men plotting something — we have no idea what — and black-and-white footage of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where you could glimpse the “greater and better tomorrow that we’re building today.”

The takeaway here is that group exhibitions are great for showcasing and contextualizing art, but that they can also be weakened by their own version of “compassion fatigue”: that is, faced with too many images and stories of suffering, we shut down. Here the risk is conflict fatigue: when the geopolitical and historical panorama becomes too dense, even a small show like “Nobody’s Property” can wear out the sympathetic viewer.